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Monthly Archives: December 2011

When the Los Angeles County Arts Commission asked Charles Phoenix what he planned to do to get into the holiday spirit, he responded by tethering a gingerbread house to 200 helium-filled balloons. But before he watched this temporary architecture soar upward into the California sky, Phoenix first visited Streit’s German Bakery, Deli & Imports, where he and baker Oscar Streit created and decorated the one-story fantasy domicile. When he later met with Ballusionist Brian Potvin and sent it 10,000-feet up, Phoenix simply exclaimed “yay!”

Rapper and actor Ice Cube narrates this Pacific Standard Time-produced video about Charles and Ray Eames, the husband-wife team perhaps best known for the their contributions to mid-century modern design. As Ice Cube cruises through Watts, Hollywood and the Pacific Palisades, he celebrates an eclectic L.A.–the good, the bad and the ugly– and when he arrives at the Eames Case Study house, it becomes clear that for Ice Cube this is the apotheosis of the city’s contribution to architecture and the Eames, a unique brand of designer whose comprehensiveness exploited industrial modes of production to install the sublime at the edge of the Pacific.

This week, WNYC’s Radiolab is hosting three episodes from the San Francisco-based, short-form radio program 99% Invisible which focuses on design and architecture. Radiolab will feature an interview with the show’s host, Roman Mars, along with the following episodes:

The Center for American Architecture and Design (CAAD), in conjunction with the School of Architecture, the College of Fine Arts, and the Butler School of Music, presented the symposium “Music in Architecture – Architecture in Music.” This cross-disciplinary symposium brought musicians, composers, architects, and scholars from around the world to explore the two arts through performances, installations, and academic research. The VRC documented all the events, including explorations of music in the landscape and papers presented on a variety of topics including the integration of music into abstract films. The set is now live on the VRC Flickr homepage.

Craig Dykers, one of the principals of the architecture firm Snøhetta, discusses the changing role of the museums in this video shot atop his design from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The video focuses on the ways in which museums will succeed and fail in the future – not simply in terms of their architecture, but also in regards to their use, the role they play in each of their cities, and their capacity to contribute to civic life. Dykers interview SFMOMA’s Dominic Willsdon and Diane Filippi from the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association. Dykers also interviews Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and former SFMOMA curator of architecture and design, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, curator of contemporary art at the Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and Darsie Alexander, chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research at Harvard University has teamed up with ARTstor to release nearly 7,000 additional images from the Image of the Black in Western Art, bringing the current total in the Digital Library to more than 14,000 images. The Institute at Harvard is the nation’s oldest research center dedicated to the study of the history, culture and social institutions of Africans and African Americans. The collection spans over 5,000 years, the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo archive is a systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been perceived and represented in Western art.

The Visual Resources Collection Fall 2011 exhibit Illuminating Atmosphere and Materiality is now available on the VRC’s Flickr page. The exhibit features photographs taken by Professor Wilfried Wang over the last two decades, with a variety of cameras and lens. Professor Wang donated these slides to the VRC to provide didactic material for professors and students for teaching and research purposes. The VRC show will run through January 6, 2012 in Sutton 3.128, with additional images running through August of 2012 in the Battle Hall hallway. The VRC exhibit archive also acts as a repository of previous exhibitions put on by the VRC. The university community can access the VRC’s online image collection and Professor Wang’s collection on ARTstor.

In conjunction with the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, ARTstor now presents more than 75 images of early 20th-century French fashion plates from La Gazette du Bon Ton to the Digital Library. La Gazette du Bon Ton was a magazine published from 1912 through 1925 that chronicled contemporary developments in fashion and the advancements of fashion illustrating. The illustrations created for the magazine probe to be the most distinctive feature of the publication, with each issue containing high-quality, hand-colored pochoir prints by notable artists such as Georges Lepape, Pierre Brissaud, Georges Barbier, and Bernard Boutet de Monvel. The prints depicted the latest haute couture designs from Parisian fashion houses like Doeuillet, Doucet, and Paquin. This set of images represent the time period between the last years of the Belle Epoque to the dawn of the Art Deco era.

Rootsweb presents Genmaps, a site devoted to online images of English, Welsh and Scottish maps from dating as early as the 12th century to the 20th century. The website possesses a drop down menu for England, Wales, and Scotland and allows the user to pick a specific map by county. These maps are pooled from a variety of different locations, including journal publications, history books, and engravings. Though many of the maps are free of copyright protection, many images, as specified, are still under copyright law and as such, will appear on the host site.

ARTstor and Via Lucis have released more than 1,300 high-resolution images of medieval Christian churches in France and Spain. Photographers Dennis Aubrey and PJ McKey’s images feature interior architecture, especially the arches, vaults, domes and buttressing that define the Romanesque and Gothic styles. As with all images present in the Digital Library, an ARTstor account is required and can be created through the UT institutional licensing of the collection. For more information, come by the Visual Resources Collection, Sutton 3.128, Monday through Friday 8 to 5 pm.

The WestLicht, the center of photography in Vienna, is an initiative striving to widen the importance of photography and it’s development in Austria. WestLicht aims to show the relationship between equipment and the art of photography. The center holds a permanent collection of over 40,000 objects of various photographic techniques, ranging from plate photographs and glass transparencies to a wide variety of printing processes. The WestLicht exhibited numerous shows that represent a variety of photography projects including the Polaroid [Im]Possible Project, David Douglas Duncan’s PICASSO, and Kaiserpanorama, a full-scale art installation apparatus for the presentation of large scale stereo images.

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The School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection (VRC) curates image content available to faculty and students at The University of Texas at Austin. For more information about the VRC's full complement of resources and services, please visit our website.